So, set aside all the speculation about what kind of scary aliens humans would be from the perspective of other species. Let’s talk fantasy for a second.
Everyone knows half elves, and we know the other half is human but we don’t call them half humans. Why? Because it’s assumed all half breeds are part human, since humans will fuck anything.
See it’s not just elves. In D&D, for example, there are half orcs, half angels, half demons, half elementals, half spirit-things, half snakes… humans are out there fucking whatever pops a tentacle through to the material plane.
And of course I’m not saying this is never consentual so the other races must have people that are dtf with humans but I don’t think they’re known for it. I think humans are the ones that initiate pretty much every time.
So I feel like in fantasy when someone is like “oh I’m the cursed offspring of a magic cow and a -” everyone will just cut them off and be like “ – human, yeah, fucking a magic cow sounds about right for those horny bastards.”
Y’know, I think the biggest drawback to the whole ‘ageless elf’ archetype is that our elf warriors and adventuresses all end up being young-looking. So this image of a middle-aged, grey-haired, veteran elvish knight in slightly battered—but distinctly elvish—armor delights me to no end.
The densest people on the internet are the ones who say sci fi and fantasy are getting too political. Why can’t we go back to the good old days of The Twilight Zone, with its various episodes about mob mentality and the danger of mass paranoia that totally weren’t about the Red Scare. Or Star Wars and its genocidal empire of racially homogeneous Aryan men. Or Dune with its religious tribal peoples who live in a desert that contains the galaxy’s most valuable resource and the wars with the foreign colonizers, that was purely from Frank Herbert’s imagination. Can you imagine how much Star Trek would suck if it was packed to the brim with ham-fisted allegories of every societal issue of the 20th century. Not like all this modern ultra-political stuff, like a woman hero.
so elves don’t get sick, right? you know what this means for early elf/human relations right
elven healers who are fantastic with injuries, but have no fucking clue what to do about even the most basic human illnesses
elven healers at the border forts in the north requesting human healers as partners so they can better care for the mixed human and elven forces stationed there
elven healers going to study with the most well-known human healers to learn about this huge new field of medicine, and sharing their knowledge with the humans in return
human healers and elven healers working together to find new treatments for diseases
Human: Oh come on, no one dies of a broken heart. Elf: (dies of sadness)
Elf: Oh come on, no one dies of the bacteria that live on their skin! Human: (dies of septicemia)
Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.
On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.
In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.
In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.
Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.
Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.
Okay, but like… While I love this, I think you’re putting the cart before the horse!
What if it’s not that humans were cultural imperialists, but rather that “human” is a social construct? Humans are the “default”, the “youngest race”, and often have the most visible genetic diversity. And although only a few races bother to have a name for part-human hybrids, mixed-race romances are attested to in plenty of stories.
So what if “human” is the word for the product of millennia of introgressive hybridization? What if “human” is the word for a genetic “mutt”, someone who’s a smidgen of most races, interbreeding for so long that they’ve become something new?
Or what if Common is taught as a religious language, like Hebrew and Arabic are in our world, and humans just happen to come from the same area where the prophet-bookwriter came from, so they speak the language natively?
Or what if humans are the language-nerds of the universe, the only race that goes around inventing dozens of new languages just for fun? So when there’s a new spell or invention, or when you need to translate a concept, you turn to the nearest human and go “hey, come up with a word for this.”
(This also explains why some spells have great names, and some are damned ridiculous. Like Mr. Tenured Elf Professor is going to do research to double-check his TA’s spell names?)
(”Smith, give me a name for this spell.” “Fuck, I don’t know, it’s fire that’s sorta like an arrow, right? Call it a fire arrow?”)
(Also: WAY too many things end up being dick jokes.)
in our dtd game, which is space fantasy, our gm has declared that ‘common’ is pretty much esperanto. it’s a constructed language designed so every species humans interact with can make/hear its phonemes. old earth languages still exist. murphy the space cowboy also speaks english, chinese, and a little spanish. he can swear in irish gaelic, though his accent is terrible. none of these are ‘common’; common is its own thing.
just moving along like everyone else 